I'm looking to update a bunch of Dell Precision T3400 & T3500 workstations. Looking at ballpark pricing and figuring the number of pc's to be updating I could save roughly $3500 by going with DDR2-800 vs. DDR2-1066 speed memory. Will the users see a difference? I mean we're going from 4gb to 8gb so hopefully that will make up for it, but I'm just wondering if I'm being penny wise and pound foolish.

29 Replies

This really depends on what the boxes are going to doing - If they are just surfing the web, opening email, and doing a few word docs, you are likely to never see an issue. On the other hand, if they are doind advanced spreads, database apps, or high memory usage apps, you may well see a performance hit.

Hard to say without knowing what apps and what use the boxes will be doing.

Your users will notice the difference just with the amount of RAM. If you have the cash for more speed, it will make tasks quicker and the OS load faster. An example is when I reload an OS. I changed the memory to a faster amount. The reinstall of Windows ran about ten minutes faster.

This is just me personally, but unless it's for gaming or heavy graphics/video processing, I don't worry too much about the RAM speed. the amount of RAM is far more important, especially if you are moving to Windows 7 systems.

We just upgraded from ~8 year old Core 2 Duo based PCs, all with 2 gigs of ram or less running either vista or XP, to 2nd gen core i5 based PCs with 4-8 gigs of ram, and although I'm sure a lot of this is the cpu, they do run blazing fast, our staff is very happy.

It's going to depend a lot on where you work and what your staff does. Mine runs a fairly processing light program and uses the web, printing, and microsoft office, so the demand is pretty light duty. If you have a company full of graphic designers.. that may be a whole different story.

I will say though, 800 mhz ram is pretty darn outdated, what with there being 2100+ possible with overclocking, and most standard memory coming in at 1600 mhz..

Out of curiosity, are you buying Dell branded RAM, or looking at all possiblities? The reason I ask is that Dell and other company specific brand name replacements and upgrades tend to be rather expensive. I know when I built a custom PC for myself last January, I got 16 gigs of 1600 mhz G.Skill ram with the possibility of overclocking it later if I chose, and that was only ~$80 total.

As mentioned, it may speed up specific memory intensive operations and the potential productivity increase resulting from the speed difference is generally negligable.

The real question will come down to the workload: Does the workload being done on the system actually even warrant a move from 4GB to 8GB or more memory at the workstation level. In general, unless you are doing graphics intensive or CAD style workloads, having much more than 4GB on the workstation is typically throwing money at a problem that doesn't exist.

As others have said, for general use, it's really Quantity over Quality, but for higher end use, speed is king.

A Thought:

DDR2 is outdated and much more expensive than DDR3. If you're nearing a system refresh, it might not be wise to bother with an upgrade, since you're spending money on systems that will be replaced soon.

I'd rather spend the money on new systems, rather than memory, even if it's going to be a 18 months before i can get new machines in there.

If it were me i'd only bother upgrading users who are having memory issues, 4gb of Memory should be enough for most light/medium use.

Out of curiosity, are you buying Dell branded RAM, or looking at all possiblities? The reason I ask is that Dell and other company specific brand name replacements and upgrades tend to be rather expensive. I know when I built a custom PC for myself last January, I got 16 gigs of 1600 mhz G.Skill ram with the possibility of overclocking it later if I chose, and that was only ~$80 total.

By expensive, you mean marked up with a high margin by the vendor, when you could just go to Newegg, Tigerdirect, Amazon, and get it for much cheaper. But yeah, I'm inclined to wonder how much quantity you're buying and where from that adds up to a $3500 difference between DDR2 800 and 1066. Once a new generation of DDR comes out, prices on the previous drop pretty fast altogether.

Since these are workstations and you will not (read: highly unlikely) be overclocking them the 800MHz DDR2 is all you need.

The performance difference on those CPU's will be very, very small.

FWIW, the 800MHz and 1066MHz speeds on memory modules is just the speed it's been "certified" to hit stably.

Your workstations are running at a bus speed of 400MHz, and unless you were planning on clocking the CPUs you don't need more then 800MHz RAM.

What software you're running doesn't affect bus speeds so having faster ram isn't going to make your software run faster unless you also upgrade the CPU's to ones that actually use the 533MHz bus speed that 1066MHz DDR2 is made for.

This is all good info. Quantity reigns over speed in almost ANY AND ALL situations. Even in high-end use, you're going to hit bottlenecks in other components in the system. The only time you'll really notice a difference in RAM speed is if you do heavy, synthetic computational work.

The reason for all this is memory timings. Timings have MUCH more of an effect than MHz, so DDR2 at CAS 4 or 5 isn't all that much slower, practically, than DDR3 at CAS 10 or 11.

Also, and I'm not sure of this so don't single-source this info, but you may be able to save a ton of money by not using ECC memory on those T3400/T3500 as comes stock. You should be able to use regular DDR2 667, which would be a pretty major cost savings.

Afeitguy, thats a 2008 article, and they based some of their decisions off of price. Toms is great, but that may be an outdated piece now. They do mention that having ram with low timing does help though, which should be the case at any speed.

This really depends on what the boxes are going to doing - If they are just surfing the web, opening email, and doing a few word docs, you are likely to never see an issue. On the other hand, if they are doind advanced spreads, database apps, or high memory usage apps, you may well see a performance hit.

Hard to say without knowing what apps and what use the boxes will be doing.

Sorry I should have included what the pc's are used for. They are Cadd stations for an Engineering firm.

Out of curiosity, are you buying Dell branded RAM, or looking at all possiblities? The reason I ask is that Dell and other company specific brand name replacements and upgrades tend to be rather expensive. I know when I built a custom PC for myself last January, I got 16 gigs of 1600 mhz G.Skill ram with the possibility of overclocking it later if I chose, and that was only ~$80 total.

By expensive, you mean marked up with a high margin by the vendor, when you could just go to Newegg, Tigerdirect, Amazon, and get it for much cheaper. But yeah, I'm inclined to wonder how much quantity you're buying and where from that adds up to a $3500 difference between DDR2 800 and 1066. Once a new generation of DDR comes out, prices on the previous drop pretty fast altogether.

I need to upgrade 91 T3400's. The 4GB kit (2GBx2) is roughly $65 a kit for the 800. I'll need 2 kits per pc so 182 kits. Doing the math that's $11830. The 1066 speed is roughly $84. Take that times 182 kits and you get $15288. There's a $3458 difference.

Afeitguy, thats a 2008 article, and they based some of their decisions off of price. Toms is great, but that may be an outdated piece now. They do mention that having ram with low timing does help though, which should be the case at any speed.

Outdated? Nothing has changed, though. And, basing decisions off of price is exactly the point of the test to begin with and what 99.99% of the people out there are concerned with. What is the "value" of going to 1066 as opposed to 800? Is it worth it? Is a 7% increase in performance when you're already going to be getting a huge performance increase from going from 4GB to 8GB worth $3500? Answer: Not even close.

Afeitguy, thats a 2008 article, and they based some of their decisions off of price. Toms is great, but that may be an outdated piece now. They do mention that having ram with low timing does help though, which should be the case at any speed.

Outdated? Nothing has changed, though. And, basing decisions off of price is exactly the point of the test to begin with and what 99.99% of the people out there are concerned with. What is the "value" of going to 1066 as opposed to 800? Is it worth it? Is a 7% increase in performance when you're already going to be getting a huge performance increase from going from 4GB to 8GB worth $3500? Answer: Not even close.

Aye, that seems be the case as I keep getting distracted by thinking about DDR3 in my head. Which is not one of the OPs options. My mistake. :)

I guess, not having priced DDR2 RAM recently, I didn't realize the price difference between it and the newer version, DDR3. Kind of shocking that 8 gigs of DDR2 goes for 3-4 times the dollar amount versus DDR3.

If you would decide to purchase the second one, make sure that your towers have the room to accommodate the height of the RAM.. don't think I have ever seen heat fins on RAM that were quite this tall before.

I dunno, you'd save almost $100 per unit, or cut your cost by 2/3 if you had DDR3 capable MoBos instead of DDR2... With the new Ivy bridge CPUs out, the old Sandy Bridge stuff (i7 and i5 etc) is dropping significantly in price. If you have a building full of engineers running CAD, that's pretty CPU intensive stuff depending on how high of a res they are rendering their projects in, and how detailed they are. You may get a few more years out of those old Core 2 Duo PCs, but you'll have to upgrade soonish I would say. May as well bite the bullet and replace them now since it's a good time to price wise. But I'm getting way off topic here.

If you're going to just do RAM, or are being forced into only doing RAM due to budget constraints, I'd probably go with:

The other obvious thing I might mention is just upgrading 1 system and doing some bench-marking to see how much the extra ram really helps. Nothing worse than spending a bunch of money, investing a bunch of time and then not getting much of a result....